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Thursday, May 25, 2017

Basic principles of oil painting

Some painting rules
are meant to be broken, but there are some absolutes that just make your
painting better and easier.

Catherine Bullinger's tree. I like the delicacy of the branches and the dappled light on the grass.

Yesterday I taught a one-day class in Rochester’s Highland
Park. It’s hard to distill the rules of painting into a three-hour class,
but here they are:

Fat over lean: This
means applying paint with more oil-to-pigment over paint with less oil-to-pigment;
in other words, use turpentine or odorless mineral spirits (OMS) judiciously in
the bottom layers and painting medium in the top layer.

Ann Limbeck caught a lovely curve in the bed of tree peonies.

The more oil, the longer the binder takes to oxidize. This keeps paints brighter and more flexible. However, oil also retards drying. Using too much in underpainting, will result in a
cracked and crazed surface over time.

The makers of Galkyd
and Liquin say their
products are designed to circumvent this rule. However, we have no track record for these alkyd-based synthetic mediums, whereas we have centuries of experience layering the traditional way.

Even if we could change it, why would we want to? Underpainting
with soft, sloppy medium gives soft, sloppy results. The coverage is spotty and
thin. The traditional method is tremendously variable and gives great control. It
just takes a little while to learn it properly.

Nicole Reddington pushed the design elements and created a myriad of greens.

Big shapes to little
shapes: Work on the abstract pattern before you start focusing
on the details.

The untrained eye looks at a scene and thinks about it
piecemeal and in terms of objects: there’s a flower, there’s a path, there’s a
tree. The trained eye sees patterns and considers the objects afterward.

Is there an interesting, coherent pattern of darks and
lights? Are there color temperature shifts you can use? In the early phases of
a painting, you must relentlessly sacrifice detail to the good of the whole. This is true whether the results you want are
hyper-realistic or impressionistic. Composition is the key to good painting,
and the pattern of lights and darks is the primary issue in composition.

Kirt Lapham allowed me to really push him out of his comfort zone, with excellent results.

Following the fat-over-lean rule, above, allows you to think
about broad shapes first. In the field an underpainting done with turpentine or
OMS will be mostly dry when you start the next layer. Stop frequently to make
sure you haven’t lost your darks. If you have, restate them.

Dark to light:
This is only important for oil painters. Acrylic painters can proceed any way
they want, as long as they’re using opaque paint. And, of course, watercolor works
(generally) in the opposite direction.

In oils, it’s easy to paint into dark passages with a
lighter color; the reverse is not true. This doesn’t mean oil painters don’t
jump around after we set the darks; we can and do.

Cris Metcalf accepted the challenge of painting white-on-white.

Don’t choose slow-drying or high-stain pigment to make your
darks. The umbers are great because the manganese in them speeds drying.
However, I don’t want to carry an extra tube just for this. I use a combination
of burnt sienna and ultramarine.

Kathy Mannix created a broad chromatic range with a small selection of pigments.

Taking time over your drawing allows you to be looser and
more assured in your painting. Do value studies and sketches before you commit
to color. Your mind needs time to think about the shapes it sees. Spend that time
in the drawing phase, when ideas are easy to assess. Otherwise, you will be doing
it on canvas, where your mistakes are more difficult to clean up.

Don Fischman finished this Fantasia at home.

Value studies and sketches allow you to be inventive. When
you’ve only spent three minutes on a sketch, you don’t lose much by throwing it
out. Drawing and value studies at the beginning actually speed you up, rather
than slow you down.

Note; I'm sorry I didn't get photos of all the work, which was excellent. I can either take pictures or teach, but not both!